Recently I was interviewed by Richard Campbell and Greg Hughs on RunAsRadio. You might have heard of Richard… he's also the host of .Net Rocks!. Where .NET Rocks! is for developers, RunAsRadio is for IT Pros.

Anyways, if you would like to listen to the interview we did on CardSpace, you can download it here. Its about a half hour long, and is a simple introduction to the world of Cardspace, atleast for the client side perspective.

For those already versed in the subject, you will notice a few term definition problems in the interview. It went by so fast, and I didn't make it clear what I was getting at. For those that don't know, here is a primer that may help understand how I talk about digital identity:

InfoCard : An information card. The previous code name for Cardspace [but now the name of the underlying technology – Kim]

Identity Card: Generic term to mean a piece of digital information that represents your identity [definition not recommended – Kim]

Identity Provider: As the name implies, a provider of one's digital identity.

Relying Party: A system/application that relies on a digital identity for authentication, and possibly authorization. It is up to this party to decide which Identity Provider(s) it is willing to trust. ie: Web site, LOB app etc

Claim: An assertion of a piece of information belonging to an identity. ie: username, password, age, phone number etc.

Wallet: A piece of software that holds Identity Cards. Vista ships with a wallet that holds Information Cards. You can also download it for XP.

In a couple of places I used the term “credential” where I was really talking about “claims”. And in passing it may sound like I was saying its the Identity Providers (IdP) role to decide who to trust. That didn't come out right. It is up to the relying party to decide which IdP it wishes to trust. In some cases, it will trust you, because you act as the provider. How? Because when you create a a self-issued card and submit it, you are asserting you are who you say you are. It won't be as trusted as much as say… a government IdP. But you get the point. I hope Kim doesn't think about throwing a brick at my head if he hears the interview [I love the interview – no brick – Kim]

Anyways, fun interview. Richard and Greg have asked me to come back and do another one where we can explore the server side of things… and discuss how Relying Parties and Identity Providers really work. We may even get into some discussion about Longhorn server and some of the interesting bits there that can be leveraged for the new digital identity ecosystem. Until then… enjoy!

Actually, Dana is remarkably precise while still being interesting. He has made even the hardest leap – separating credentials from claims cleanly enough that he catches himself when at one point he starts to slip.

In the interview Dana says “InfoCards”, and uses the word properly – to refer to the the technology we are working on across the industry. “Windows CardSpace”, on the other hand, is the name of the Microsoft implementation of this technology.

I take full responsibility for confusing everyone in this regard – and apologize to Dana and all my readers – because early in the product cycle I conflated our proposed technology ideas and our Microsoft implementation. Over time we've become very crisp about our usage. CardSpace is the way we store Information Cards on Windows; people abbreviate Information Cards into “InfoCards”.

I do not use and do not like the phrase “Identity Cards” when talking about digital identity.

“Identity Cards” conjure up government-issued citizen identities. While government cards are a legitimate notion when interacting with government sites, we don't want to imply that government-issued identities should be used everywhere or for everything! People need to be able to assert different identities and decide which ones they want to pull out of their “wallets” – just as they do in the physical world.

But I nit-pick. If you want to learn about CardSpace and Information Cards, check out this interview.

I was initially a bit skeptical about this book because – I hope my more politically inclined friends will forgive me – it was published by what I assume is a political “think tank”. I worried it might reflect some kind of ideology, rather than being a dispassionate examination of reality.

But in this case I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Jim Harper really understands identification. And he is better than anyone at explaining what identification systems won't do for us – or our institutions. He carefully explains why many of the proposed uses of identification are irrational – delivering results that are quite unrelated to what they are purported to do. In my view, getting this message out is just as important as explaining what identity will do. In fact it is a prerequisite for the identity big-bang. There are two sides to this equation an we need to understand them both.

He directly takes on the myth that if only we knew what peoples’ identifiers were, “we would be safe”. Metaphorically, he is asking what kind of plane we would rather fly in – one where the passengers’ identifiers have been checked against a database or one where they and their luggage have been screened for explosives and guns?

I think he will convey to “lay people” why a so-called “blacklist” is one of the weakest forms of protection, showing that all you have to do is impersonate anyone not on it to sneak through the cracks.

The book is full of important discussions. It has chapters like “Use identification less” and “Use authorization more.” I have only one criticism of the book. I would like to see us separate the notion of identity, on the one hand, and individual identification (or identifiers) on the other. We need return to the original meaning of identity: the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.

As a simple example, suppose I'm a service provider building a chat room for children, and want to limit participation to children who are between 12 and 15. Let me contrast two ways of doing this.

In the first, all the children are given an identifier. To get into the room, they present their identifier and prove they are the person to whom that identifier was given. Then the chatroom system does a lookup in some public system linking identifier and age to make the access control decision.

In the second, the children are given a “digital claim” that they are of some age, and a way to prove they are the person to whom that “claim” was given. The chatroom system just queries the claim to see if it meets its criteria. There is no reference to any public or even private identifier.

My point is that the first mechanism involves use of an identifier. The second still involves identity – in the sense of being what a person is – but the identification, so rightly put into question by Jim's book, has been put into the trashcan where it belongs.

The use of an identifier in our first example breaks the second Law of Identity (Data Minimization – release no more data than necessary). It breaks the third Law too (Fewest Parties – since it discloses use of information to a central database unnecessary to the transaction). Finally, it breaks the Fourth Law (using an omnidirectional identifier when none is required).

The book was written before “claims-based thinking” began to gain mindshare, and so it's missing as a category in Jim's discussion of advanced identity technologies. But we've talked extensively about these issues and we have concluded that we have no theoretical difference – in fact the alignment between his work and the Laws of Identity struck us both as remarkable given that we come at these issues from such different starting points.

Jim's book is wonderful reading. It should help newcomers better understand the Laws of Identity. And this week the Cato Institute in Washington held an event at which Jim spoke, along with James Lewis, Director and Senior Fellow, Technology and Public Policy Program Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Jay Stanley, Public Education Director, Technology and Liberty Project American Civil Liberties Union.

My guest on the show this week is Kim Cameron. Kim is Microsoftâ€™s Identity Chief and as such is responsible for developing CardSpace – Microsoftâ€™s successor to the much reviled Passport. Kim elucidated the Seven Laws of Identity and is developing CardSpace to conform to those laws. If he manages this, he will have changed fundamentally how Microsoft deals with people.

Kim is also responsible for Microsoft recently releasing 35 pieces of IP and promising to never charge for them.

Here are the questions I asked Kim and the times I asked them:

Kim, I introduced you as Microsoftâ€™s Identity Chief, what is your official title in Microsoft? – 0:35

What does the Chief Architect of Identity do in Microsoft? – 01:02

Why is it necessary to have identity products in software? – 01:29

How do I know who I am dealing with on the internet? How is that problem being solved? – 03:56

And you as Microsoftâ€™s Identity Architect are coming up with a way to resolve this called CardSpaceâ€¦ – 07:08

You were saying CardSpace is to be platform independent, I run a Mac, will it run on the Mac? – 15:26

You mentioned a couple of companies, are the offerings from these companies going to interoperate or are we going to have another version of the VHS/BetaMax wars? – 17:45

Perhaps more than any of the other Vista-era technologies, in order to really catch on, CardSpace requires broad cross-platform adoption. Kim personally is doing a lot to showcase the use of CardSpaceâ€™s open standards. What does the broader effort to engage with other platforms and communities look like, and how is CardSpace being received? – 21:10

CardSpace uses an intuitive wallet-and-credit-card metaphor. One of the features of a wallet is that itâ€™s portable â€“ I several pieces of identity with me at all times. I tend to move between computers a lot. What provisions are there in CardSpace for helping me keep mobile (in a secure way)? – 25:07

Whatâ€™s cooking on the identity managemnt front at MSFT? Weâ€™ve been hearing about this on and off for a while – we need progress if weâ€™re not to be weighed down byt having to remember so many usernames and passwords for the servics we consume. – 30:35

My questions again:

Will there be a lot of re-engineering of web apps required to roll out these technologies? – 34:03

And finally you mentioned that this is the first version what can we expect in the next versions and when will they be released? – 39:58

Download the entire interview here
(19.3mb mp3)
Let me make one thing clear about Microsoft's Open Specification Promise: many people were involved, and Microsoft's legal people, along with their colleagues representing open source thinkers aned companies, deserve all the credit.

Check out the other interviews on the site (I think I'm number 48). Doug Kaye was number 47, and there are lots of good things to listen to while on the treadmill (physical or metaphorical).